'Mugged by reality': How the 'dissident right' is rebelling against MAGA
President Donald Trump on March 14, 2025 (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian/Flickr)
During a recent rant on his HBO show "Real Time," political comedian Bill Maher bluntly addressed MAGA Republicans who think he might be ready to come over to their side. Maher (who met with President Donald Trump in the White House) stressed that for all his disdain for "wokeness" and political correctness, he has zero desire to embrace the far-right extremes of MAGA — he will talk to MAGA Republicans, but he is still far some being on board with their agenda and detests their cultish devotion to Trump.
Maher even compared fawning MAGA adulation of Trump to the communist regime in North Korea.
Maher's "anti-wokeness" draws a lot of attention from what is sometimes described as the "dissident right" — people who have a history of expressing liberal views but grew fed up with "political correctness" and "social justice warriors." However, the New York Times' Michelle Goldberg, in her April 14 column, is noticing a trend: the "dissident right" feeling major anxiety now that the United States has a far-right MAGA administration in the White House.
"The writer Richard Hanania once said that he hated bespoke pronouns 'more than genocide,'" Goldberg observes, "and his 2023 book, 'The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics,' provided a blueprint for the White House's war on DEI. But less than three months into Trump's new term, he regrets his vote, telling me, 'The resistance libs were mostly right about him'…. Scott Siskind, who blogs under the pseudonym Scott Alexander, has been an influential figure in Silicon Valley's revolt against social justice ideology, though he's never been a Trump supporter."
Goldberg continues, "Last week, he asked whether 'edgy heterodox centrists' like himself paved the way for Trump by opening the door to once-verboten arguments….. It is too early to know what these small cracks in the dissident right mean and whether they presage more substantial defections. They suggest to me, however, that not everyone can sustain the level of cognitive dissonance necessary to rationalize away this administration’s destructiveness."
The Times columnist cites podcast host Alex Kaschuta as another "dissident right" figure who is rebelling against MAGA and Trump's second administration.
"When liberalism was firmly entrenched," Goldberg explains, "its discontents could treat authoritarian ideas as interesting avant-garde provocations. Authoritarianism in power, however, was always going to be crude and stupid…. Well before the tariffs, Kaschuta, who trained as an economist, was moving away from the movement that once thrilled her…. For all her mounting disgust, however, the tariffs seemed to push her over the edge. When she looks back on the milieu she was once a part of, she said, she sees no solid ideas for a post-liberal society — it was all just aesthetics, resentments and vibes."
Goldberg draws a parallel between "dissident right" figures rebelling against MAGA and the late Irving Kristol's move to the right. Kristol was the father of The Bulwark's Bill Kristol, a Never Trump conservative and neocon who became an unlikely ally of Democrats.
"Irving Kristol famously said that neoconservatives were liberals who'd been 'mugged by reality,'" Goldberg writes. "Maybe soon, we'll need a similar word for the right wingers who can't stand to live in the world they helped build."
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Michelle Goldberg's full New York Times column is available at this link (subscription required).
